Loving Yourself: Six things to give up in order to fully love yourself

• Posted on June 29, 2018
• by Ellsamwise King
• Comment

Everything seemed to be okay yesterday. But today you woke up, and suddenly you feel degrees of separation and stress from the changes and loss in your current life situations that is overwhelming you. I get it because I remember experiencing those feelings several years ago. It is not just one event, but a series of events that began to pile up.

Emotional Pile Up

• That person you thought had potential to rent space in your heart runs hot and without warning becomes cold.
• Your best friend gets a life-threatening diagnosis from the oncologist and is undergoing chemotherapy while you become their pillar of strength.
• Your teenager graduates high school and goes off to college.
• You just moved to a new residence.

So here you are. New environment, no significant other to hold hands with, your BFF is too sick to have dinner with you, and you find yourself savoring every morsel of texts and calls from your young adult child that has flown the coop to his personal journey. You ask yourself, “What is going on, and why do I feel empty”? You begin to feel weary as that soft, boggy area of land starts to give way beneath you. So how do you climb out of this field of quagmire, and where are the seeds of growth to be found in this marsh?

No one wants to be unhappy and everyone wants to feel love. Statistics show that 85% of the population are affected by low self-esteem. The culprit is the absence of self-love. There are things you can give up and return to that place where you can love yourself again. It sounds simple but we often forget this. When you love yourself you can experience happiness.

Six things to give up in order to fully love yourself…

1. Give up defining yourself with the changes in your body. Changes in our bodies can sometimes redefine us, causing us to stop loving ourselves. Don’t fall into that egoic trap. You are perfect just as you are!
2. Give up seeing events as your life. Sometimes these events will cause us to feel fear instead of love. Know that your natural ability to love yourself is in the present moment, not in an event.
3. Give up all judgment, including self-judgment. When we experience unkind judgment from others it can be debilitating if we believe it. The same holds true when we self-judge. Don’t judge yourself. Love yourself.
4. Give up identifying yourself with others. Loss of someone or something has the potential to define us. We identify ourselves with everything and everyone in our lives, and along the way, we lose who we truly are because we had this false sense of self that attached to everything in the world as we knew it. Give up identifying yourself with others and see yourself as a unique and loving piece of this amazing universal landscape. Honor your losses, be thankful they shared paths with you.
5. Give up your fight against change and voluntarily move on. Often separation makes us feel less needed and unimportant because there is a sense of change that we fear. There will come several points in our life, however, where we will have to give up the fight against change and voluntarily move on. We have to give up things in order to grow.
6. Give up the fear factor. We cannot love deeply without experiencing loss, and we cannot engage our creative self without having a change in our life. One of the biggest offenders against personal growth and choosing to love yourself is fear. If you are living in fear, it will obscure your heart’s natural ability to love yourself and others.

No matter what, love yourself and shine it on others. It is why we are here.